But Covid mortality does have a connection to those other ailments. A large majority of Covid deaths occur in people older than sixty-five. In Ohio, for example, the median age of a patient dying of Covid-19 is 80.2 Not surprisingly, given the age of the most vulnerable population, many of the victims are also suffering from other illnesses at the time of death. Doctors call these conditions comorbidities, and in many cases Covid kills people who are likely to die within months of some other cause. The state of New York, for example, has reported that 90 percent of those dying with Covid have at least one comorbidity, such as hypertension, diabetes, coronary artery disease, or cancer. Thousands of Covid deaths in New York have occurred among people who were at least eighty years old and also suffering from dementia.3
How many lives and how many trillions of dollars could the United States have saved if the Chinese Communist Party had not lied and suppressed information about the virus in the early days of the epidemic?
President Trump ordered travel restrictions between China and the United States on January 31, 2020. The next day Joe Biden tweeted, “We are in the midst of a crisis with the coronavirus. We need to lead the way with science—not Donald Trump’s record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering. He is the worst possible person to lead our country through a global health emergency.”4 Under a President Biden, would passengers from Wuhan still be arriving at airports in the United States?
The Chinese regime should have banned international flights weeks earlier, which might have saved the world from the global emergency. Instead of trying to protect lives and halt the spread of infection, the government in Beijing initially focused on silencing people who acknowledged the deadly threat emerging in the city of Wuhan in Hubei province.
A week after Trump’s travel order, people all over China were mourning the loss of a heroic young doctor who had tried to sound the alarm. Dr. Li Wenliang was just thirty-three years old when he left behind a wife, a child, and another on the way. In late December 2019, the Wuhan physician had begun warning about a series of pneumonia cases that he initially thought were caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, but later concluded were tied to a novel coronavirus.
Instead of receiving praise for spotting a deadly threat, Dr. Li was interrogated by Communist Party officials. Local police forced him to write a statement blaming himself and pledging to stop spreading “rumors.”
“They told me not to publish any information about this online,” Dr. Li later told the Beijing Youth Daily. “Later, the epidemic started to spread noticeably. I’d personally been treating someone who was infected, and whose family got infected, and so then I got infected.”5
After his death, the South China Morning Post quoted a Wuhan university professor named Tang Yiming: “If the words of Dr Li had not been treated as rumours, if every citizen was allowed to practise their right to voice the truth, we would not be in such a mess, we would not have a national catastrophe with an international impact.”6
The professor wasn’t alone. “On Chinese social media,” reported the Wall Street Journal’s Jonathan Cheng, “commenters posted tributes to Dr. Li, circulating a quote from an interview he had given just days before his death: ‘I believe a healthy society should not just have one voice.’ ”7
At least for a moment the voice of the dictatorship wasn’t able to drown out the cries of protest. “The outpouring of grief and anger online has overwhelmed censors battling to repress the most scathing voices and damaging comments,” Tan Dawn Wei reported in Singapore’s Straits Times. “Hashtags like ‘we want freedom of speech,’ which started trending on Chinese microblogging site Weibo shortly after Dr Li’s death, have since been scrubbed clean. But another trend has emerged, featuring selfies of people wearing a face mask with the words, ‘bu neng, bu mingbai’ (can’t, don’t understand) written on it. The words refer to a declaration that Dr Li was forced to sign by the Wuhan police, in which he was asked if he could comply with the local authorities and stop spreading ‘rumours,’ to which Dr Li wrote, ‘can.’ He was also asked if he understood that he would face the full force of the law if he continued his ‘illegal activities,’ to which he wrote, ‘I understand.’ ”8
The people of China, held captive by the Beijing dictatorship, still can’t exercise free speech. And the United States is still wrestling with the virus that the Chinese Communist Party allowed to attack an unsuspecting world. Appearing on Mornings with Maria on April 17, 2020, U.S. secretary of state Mike Pompeo said, “the Chinese Communist Party needs to come clean about what took place there” and noted that the United States was seeking access to a Wuhan virology lab “so that we can determine precisely where this virus began.”9
It’s appropriate to blame the Chinese regime for its lies and cover-ups related to the virus. But many U.S. mayors and governors can also be blamed for overreacting to it. From the moment Covid-19 emerged in the United States and throughout the period of pandemic, the media and political class was largely uninterested in exploring the costs and benefits of potential responses. The consensus was to shut down much of the economy and create massive government programs to clumsily offset the damage. President Trump initially and sensibly avoided endorsing the lockdowns enacted by state and local politicians. But after being told by federal health experts that the alternative would result in the deaths of millions of Americans, he supported the idea of shutting down for several weeks to “flatten the
